Californians Can Have Self-Driving Cars By 2017

While California law doesn’t now allow general use of self-driving cars on public roads, Google might be able to offer such a service on private properties and college campuses. It tends not to work out well. Google hopes to influence the DMV with its arguments.

It’s the turnaround in spirit that he finds most confusing as the project has gone on, however. “And I would be one of those people”.

During a test past year, Rajkumar somehow revealed the flaws of this technology. Tesla’s new Autopilot feature allows the electric vehicle to change lanes on its own after the driver flicks the stalk.

“We end up being cautious”.

So although we’re not quite at the point of hopping to a driverless vehicle that gets us where we need to go while we totally disengage from the road ourselves, this is a big step in that direction. What’s more, in the incident of a road accident, the human driver will be liable, rather than the vehicle.

“It’s a dilemma that needs to be addressed”, Rajkumar said. They have to figure out how to teach the cars to make life-or-death decisions in an accident.

This approach seems to me to be the one most likely to deliver us fully autonomous vehicles.

The proposal would have the potential to set a precedent, and was seen as certain to slow down the speed with which the technology would go mainstream.

Google is on a fast track.

Google has already announced its plans to make its driverless cars unit a stand-alone business under the Alphabet Incorporated umbrella next year, as stated by Bloomberg.

Google has been on the forefront of the driverless vehicle effort.

Astro Teller, head of the X division, has on several occasions said that the company’s tests show humans to be a poor fallback, because once they learn to trust self-driving technology they ignore the road and therefore are not well equipped to take over in the event of an emergency. There were no injuries and only minor damage to both vehicles.

But the DMV, I’m afraid, is caught in “abundance of caution” mode. As Google reminds us, human error causes 94 percent of collisions. The greatest benefit of a self driving auto is that people don’t have to drive them. “Driving is a social game”. When they come to a stop sign, they stop. Even though, they have had very few crashes and that too with majority of them owing to mistakes committed by other human drivers, safety concerns still loom large. How often did the vehicle experience a situation it could not diagnose or handle correctly? “They’re a little faster to react, taking drivers behind them off guard”. Consumers simply don’t know enough about the technology to weigh in yet, which is why Google is trying to, and overdoing it sometimes, explain the ins and outs the best they can. “It’s a problem that I’m sure Google is working on, but how to solve it is not clear”. Not that another clause that mandated a steering wheel and brake pedals on such vehicles found much favor with the Mountain View, California-based search giant either. “This would increase the caution of other drivers until the time when most cars are driverless”, Segers wrote.